


Stones

by cherrysprite



Series: Quarantine Fics [17]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, First Kiss, Getting Together, Good Theo Raeken, He's cute, Introspection, M/M, Post-Canon, Theo Raeken-centric, Theo collects rocks, rock collecting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:48:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24241579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrysprite/pseuds/cherrysprite
Summary: Theo begins to find his place as a normal nineteen year old with an accidental rock collection.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: Quarantine Fics [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691383
Comments: 19
Kudos: 171





	Stones

When you’re a chimera who’s spent a lot of his life living underground, doing nothing more than soaking up information and scheming, it’s kind of hard to fit yourself back into society after everything is said and done. The world feels so big, but not always bright - in fact, Theo finds it muddled and overwhelming on good days. 

There’s just so much to do. He knows that other people have no problem with this. They fit into their lives like it’s natural, because for them, it is; they haven’t been desensitized to basic human things, living under a rock, but he still can’t wrap his mind around simple things. He doesn’t understand at first how people get to where they are. 

When he sees people on the street walking and talking with their friends, he wonders what the story was and how it happened. Were they best friends in childhood? Did they only meet a few days ago? How did they become such good friends? When he sees the baristas at work through the windows of a local cafe, he wonders how they got those jobs and who they had to talk to along the way. 

One day, he sees a man sitting outside that said cafe, playing his guitar softly while people walk past without a second thought. It’s one of the more jarring parts of Theo’s detachment, he realizes. If he were normal, he would be able to grasp how people managed to pick up on hobbies and skills. It was like Mason and his love of reading, Corey and his talent with writing, and Liam spending his weekends playing lacrosse or working out. He just always finds himself perplexed at how they’d each figured out that what they were doing was good to them.

Logically, he knows how. Mason had grown up with a librarian father who always gave him books to read, Corey was placed into a creative writing class in freshman year and turned out to really like it, and Liam had gained his athletic interests from his stepfather who trained with him as a way to release his anger. Everyone has a reason for what they did, Theo knows that. He just doesn’t see it happening for himself.

It just seems to him like nothing is interesting. He’s tried doing what the people around him do, but he can’t find anything that he actually enjoys doing. He decided at one point to sit down with a book, which was fine, but he didn’t see how Mason absorbed himself into anything and everything he read. He tried to write, but words didn’t flow nearly as easily as Corey makes them look. It’s no secret that Theo works out, but sports don’t really interest him either. All he can think about when playing them is that he’d rather be working out alone. 

It doesn’t matter what it is - playing an instrument, painting a picture, learning a new thing - he just can’t find a reason to do any of it. The guitar didn’t offer any accomplishment to him, his painting was uninspired, and he couldn’t find anything that he wanted to study. It leaves him feeling empty, if he’s honest with himself. He’s beginning to think that this is just another aspect of human life that he isn’t capable of now that there’s not an enemy to fight.

He’s walking home from the cafe one day, drink in hand. It’s after a failed attempt of picking the first headline on Google News and researching it, somehow thinking that he was going to suddenly find a passion for a new outer space project and start idolizing NASA, so he’s already down. He knows that when he gets back to Liam’s house, where he’s been staying for awhile, he’ll find the beta idly doing something he finds interesting, and Theo will go and do something just to fill time.

He sips on his coffee that’s just a little too sweet, kicking at the ground and hoping he doesn’t trip over his untied shoelace. His hope doesn’t last too long, because he almost sends himself down onto the sidewalk a second later when he steps on his lace, damp from the recently rained-on concrete, so he curses to himself and bends down to tie it before he can do anymore harm and drop his coffee. He ties up his shoe and tightens the other one, and is about to stand up and start walking again when he catches something out of the corner of his eye.

It’s just a rock, but it’s flat and smooth, about sitting where the grass of somebody’s yard meets the sidewalk. He gets the urge to pick it up, so thinking nothing of it, he swipes it out of the grass and examines it. It’s nothing special, about the size of Theo’s palm and then some, but Theo finds himself appreciative of how uniformly flat it is on the other side as well. He doesn’t know what makes him do it, but he slips it into the pocket of his jeans without another thought. 

He doesn’t think about it again until he goes to sit on his bed in a room that still doesn’t feel like his and ends up feeling it poking into his hip. He takes it out of his pocket, looks at it one more time, and then sets it down on his dresser. It sits there for a few days, just there to be glanced at every so often. 

+++

Theo doesn’t notice it as he’s doing it, but he keeps finding cool-looking rocks and picking them up on his way from place to place. Sometimes he’ll get home and there’s more than one in his pockets to put on his dresser, which he counts as a win. They’re all basically the same, just random stones he finds at random, but he likes them anyway. It’s something to keep him occupied when he’s walking.

“You’ve got a lot of rocks,” Liam says one day after he walks into Theo’s room uninvited. Theo makes a note of it to close his door next time, because Liam seems to take a crack as an invitation. Theo glances over to his dresser, which now has six stones on its surface. He just shrugs and goes back to scrolling through his phone. “This one is cool.”

Liam has the first rock in his hand, rubbing his thumb over the smooth grey surface, and Theo nods. “Yeah,” He says. “That one’s my favorite.”

He doesn’t catch it, too focused on looking anywhere but Liam, but Liam gives him this kind of soft smile. He’s noticed that Theo has had a hard time fitting into normal life too, not that he’s ever brought it up, so he thinks it’s nice that Theo’s starting to develop some of his own interests. 

+++

Theo keeps picking up rocks and bringing them home to set on his dresser until he tries to put a new one down and another one falls off. Then he starts stacking them, since there’s not enough room anymore.

“There are different types of rocks, you know,” Liam says, once again slipping through a cracked door. “You can look online for them if you can’t find them yourself.”

  
That catches Theo’s attention. “You can buy rocks?” He asks, the concept being entirely new. Liam smiles again, but he just passes it off as being amusement. 

“Yeah, my grandma used to buy them to make into jewelry. She got them off Etsy and stuff,” Liam says.

Theo takes it to mind, and as soon as Liam leaves the room, he types it into a new tab on his phone. He spells the website wrong at first, but once he finds it, he cluelessly types “rocks” into the search bar on the shop site. 

The first result is a huge chunk of something blue, Sodalite, as it’s called, which looks a lot different than the random grey rocks that Theo’s been finding on the sidewalk. It’s more of a crystal than a rock, but it still catches his eye. He’d probably look into it more if it wasn’t thirty-four dollars. The prospect of buying new rocks is admittedly nice, but he isn’t sure how much he’s willing to spend on them.

Most of the other results looked a lot like the rocks Theo had been picking up, being sold so that people could decorate them, not collect. He skips past those many results, plus a few smaller bags of rocks for fish tanks, until he finds something else that’s pretty. That one’s a ridiculously large hunk of a pinkish stone called rose quartz, and it costs almost seven hundred dollars since it’s polished and a few feet in diameter. Obviously Theo wasn’t buying that, but he kept looking.

He stumbles upon Moss Agate, a deep green stone, and a chunk only costs three dollars. This, Theo can get behind. He likes the color and how shiny they are, so he adds one to his shopping cart and keeps looking.

The next thing he finds is a handful of something called Green Aventurine stones, which is four dollars for around twenty tiny ones. They’re not as dark as the Moss Agate, but he likes how smooth they look. He can already feel how they would be to the touch in the palm of his hand. Those go into the cart next to Moss Agate.

A half-hour later, he finds himself with a cart full of different types of rocks, and he doesn’t even mind spending the money on them. He has a credit card and hates using it to buy food too often, but he finds that he doesn’t have much hesitation when it comes to something as simple as a rock. 

+++

The first box comes to the front door a few weeks later, and the second and third ones come not long after that. Each time, Theo grabs them off the front step as fast as he can before one of Liam’s parents asks what it all is, taking them up the stairs to his room quickly. He doesn’t mind Liam seeing it, since he was the one who suggested Theo buying them in the first place, but it seemed kind of silly to say that he was spending money on some stones.

And it was silly in his opinion, but he also liked having them. He didn’t do a ton of research about them and how they were made, he just thought they were pretty to look at. He looked up what types of rocks he could buy and find himself so that he would have a bigger collection of them, and it grew steadily. He now had some gemstones and crystals along with his other stones, and those were some of his favorites.

He had the Moss Agate and Green Aventurine, but since then he’s gotten Turquoise, Rhodonite, different colored sea glass, Yellow Citrine, and Obsidian. He’s even found some on his own, like rose quartz, which he tends to find in sandier places.

His collection has grown so much that it starts to not be able to fit on his dresser anymore. His little fixation on rocks grew so that he would have them on his bedside table and bookshelf before he thought to be organizing them, and that was an entire process of its own.

He buys divider cases for all the different types of stone he has, and he’s kind of disappointed that he can’t display all of them at once anymore, so he switches them out every so often. Today, a few months after he started accidentally collecting rocks, he has his first ever rock and a couple of other rocks out to look at. 

It’s when he’s tucking his case of stones under his bed when he realizes how big his collection has really gotten, and how much he’s enjoyed doing it. 

Maybe collecting rocks is to Theo what lacrosse is to Liam, he thinks. At first, he thinks it’s ridiculous, because everyone else’s things have a lot more of what they do actively, but then he realizes that he’s right. 

Sometimes, people don’t have motivations for things. There doesn’t have to be a backstory to everything all the time. Sometimes people’s interests come about as simple as picking up a book one day, and in Theo’s case, seeing a cool rock that he slips into his pocket. 

It may be ridiculous - both to have such fun just collecting rocks and the warm feeling that spreads in his chest when he thinks about it - but Theo smiles to himself. He was wrong about that little part of humanity that he couldn’t have.

+++

It’s not the easiest hobby to explain to people when they ask what he likes to do in his freetime - he knows it probably makes him sound really boring, but he doesn’t mind. The important thing is that he understands why it’s fun, and the people around him try to.

Liam tries more than most, and it spreads that same warm feeling through his chest. Sometimes he’ll come into his room to look at the rocks with him, and he’ll ask what they are, even though he doesn’t know what all the words mean. Theo doesn’t mind it. They’ll stand close together in front of his dresser as Liam picks up each one and looks at it idly, and he doesn’t miss the looks Liam will give him when he’s talking. It’s funny how there used to be a time when Liam couldn’t stand to hear Theo’s voice, but now he looks at Theo like he’s the sun and moon whenever he speaks. It makes him feel almost dizzy. He puts the feeling away for awhile. Even though he’s found out that a lot of things in life are a lot more simple than he thought they were, his feelings for Liam wasn’t one of them.

But he doesn’t have a whole lot of time before he has to think about it again, not that he minds. Liam comes into his room with something held behind him in his hand, looking excited. “I found something,” Liam says excitedly. Theo raises an eyebrow at him and stands up from where he was sitting in bed, and Liam holds his hand out. When he opens his fingers, there’s a rock in the palm of his hand. “I thought it looked cool, right?” 

It’s just a piece of Rose Quartz, common, and Theo has a lot of them already, but he still smiles when Liam tips it into his hand. “Yeah,” He says, rubbing his thumb over the surface. The ones that Theo has are mostly smooth and polished. This one has been scrubbed clean under the kitchen sink, dirt still remaining in the ridges and cracks, but Theo loves it nevertheless - it’s like him. It’s also from Liam. “I thought you might like it.”

Theo sets down the rock on his dresser right next to the first one. It’s his new favorite and deserves a place there.

“I do,” Theo says. Liam looks up at him, happy with himself, with a little glimmer in his eye as he bites on his bottom lip.

That’s when he knows he can’t ignore what isn’t simple anymore. It worked with rocks, and it’ll work with Liam too.

When Theo kisses him, it’s not like finding a nice rock on the street. There’s history behind it, a history he knows, and a future he wants to create. Liam melts under his touch like he’s been waiting for it forever, and Theo feels exactly the same with the smooth glide of their lips.

He has the simple, but he also has the complicated, and both of them feel so good. They anchor him to the ground a little more; they anchor him to a life that’s slowly but surely leveling itself out. Liam’s right there with him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!  
> I really don't know where this came from, to be honest. It was going to be a drabble about Theo and collecting rocks, but it became more about Theo's place in the world and less thiam-y. It's more about Theo himself than anything else.   
> Even though it's not my normal romance-filled works, I hope you enjoyed it anyway :)
> 
> Comments are always appreciated!  
> tumblr: grenadinepeach


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